When I came to, I was lying in an awkward zigzag sort of shape on the planks of a worn-out amusement park ride. Incredible pulsing aches echoed from not only my head, but all my joints. Some things can’t be fixed with a Level Up heal, apparently.
The night was silent.
With a groan, I turned my head. I’d noticed that my hands were empty, and I seriously doubted that as I got the concussion clearly drumming in my brain, I’d had presence of mind to put it away.
Gold…get…
My human hand reached for the twinkle of blood-spattered gold that had to be the blade. It wasn’t far away, but right now, anything felt far, including for my System.
Inventory…gold…get…
This isn’t working, I realized dully. System…please…just…gold........get?
What was the command again?
I racked my brain, got nothing. System…help…gold, um, gold blade…get?
Gold Vault unlocked. Gold: 7251
What would you like to do with your gold? Add to Inventory
Invest through August Augur Mutual
Exchange for SierraBux
Donate to Earth charities
No! I thought, flailing and writhing. What is this crap?! I just want the blade, the thing that’s right there! And I began crawling towards the thing, driven less by need and more by pure spite against the unhelpful System.
I…urgh…I want that in my Inventory, not random gold!
Gold of quantity Random has been added to your Inventory.
Error: Insufficient space in Inventory.
THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANTED!
If you are not satisfied with your banking experience, please reach out to August Augur Mutual.
Is that a real bank, or… I couldn’t even muster up the mental energy to ask the whole question.
Whatever. Didn’t matter, I was close to the blade again. Ejecting the first thing my mind could think to get rid of—a Nature Spell—I then tried to remember the blade’s actual name.
It’s the Debug Blade.
Um........is that a pun? Man, I hope not.
The blade landed safely in my Inventory.
And I may have been in serious pain, but I was safe too. All raccoons either had fled or were lying around the carousel on their backs and sides. Destroyed by a total rampage.
The Debug Blade scared me, and I did not like it.
I had to have liked it once—was hoping it’d be a cool and friendly uber-powerful item to whip out when needed or convenient, then forget, and not feel as if the mere act of carrying it dismembered me. But every time I took one step forward with the thing, I took another two backward.
I un-Morphed and took another half-hour just to lie there and rest. Then another. Then two more. I Meditated when it occurred to me to do so, but that didn’t give me any inner peace—and the lack of it actually made me more frustrated and achey. Somewhere in there, I took a Catnap, but it was briefer than usual, maybe because there was nothing to heal. Well, “nothing.”
I’d have to get moving sometime. The longer I waited here, my body rolled up like a chrysalis, the more uncomfortably comfortable I became. Like time, and others, lost their meaning.
Another hour passed, and another.
***
Possy was gnawing on a wooden werewolf mask.
They looked pretty relaxed down there, in the storeroom below the rotten hatch at the carousel’s center. Around them were other old toys and novelties from whenever this park was still active. From the final day, I guessed, and then scavenged and pooled together by intrepid animals.
The raccoons’ treasure, dubious as it was.
I could see myself on another day getting jazzed about everything here. Rubble hadn’t fully tarnished the red and blue paint of devil, fae, and feline masks. Toy carts and wheelbarrows still rolled. Possy also seemed to like a toy duck sitting under their forefeet. It was nothing but a head, chest, and foot, but the friendly gleam in its eye wanted me to remember easier days.
A hand reached down and touched Possy, tentatively, on the back.
Possy froze. They were not an animal trained to be touched, no matter how gently, or whether they knew who was touching them or not. There wasn’t a guarantee that, with this form, they knew me. Or would want to, given all the raccoon blood still on me and the traces—still detectable as scent—of raging adrenaline.
Possy didn’t move. Not retreating nor attacking.
Their back was ragged, torn, and riddled with fleabites. I stroked it in full, my hand gliding to their tail, as I kneeled beside them.
Possy relaxed, seemingly untroubled. They continued gnawing on the edges of masks, and I kept wondering what it was about soft things and soft creatures that could soothe a domesticated thing like me.
***
When morning came, I felt as fresh as could be expected. Luckily, I felt better—meaning this was an ongoing recovery process. But I didn’t feel much better.
It was manageable, though, especially given how motivating my current goal was.
No, that goal wasn’t finding cantrip ingredients. That, too, had been a wash. In fact, it was almost bizarre how few vines I’d seen despite following Bayce’s instructions. In the end, though…
I just wanted to go home. The cabin was waiting for me. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe it’d be an oasis of calm forever, or even for long, given all the shenanigans happening lately, but I could, y’know…hang out there with people I really really liked, and their presence alone, it turned out, made a difference.
Even Possy had made a difference, and Possy made no move to follow me once I finally crawled out of that hatch. Possy obeyed nothing and no one. They followed no flag. I knew without even consciously thinking it that I would never own a pet, but I appreciated the possum for being, however briefly, a sort of…comfort animal. I hoped they’d had as much fun wrestling me as I had them, and wished them silent luck as the sun rose.
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Then I pulled myself out of the carousel and sprinted in a beeline back toward the cabin.
Quest: Explore the Vencian Wood Progress: 50% (15/30)
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map106-1.png]
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map106-2.png]
Current Location: Festive Field (S.F4)
A gentle drizzle had rained across the flat plain. I almost felt annoyed for not having seen and felt it—then I remembered, oh yeah I’d been under a big huge carousel roof, and oh yeah I was also in a disturbing amount of pain at the time.
Foxes who ordinarily would’ve been easy, enticing targets were simply sped by. A hawk who picked me for a sparring partner-slash-breakfast dove for me, and I Leaped away, happy to have at least left them in the dust.
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map106-3.png]
Current Location: ??? (S.E4)
It was still dawn when I crossed into the northern portion of some unknown territory. The twinkle of a brook invited me to take a break and actually eat something—come to think of it, I was starving. I still had some fragments of raw gackern, and I did want the pit dragon’s toenail to be relatively clean before I handed it off to Bayce, so I ate on both of these, and sipped at waters that were amazingly clear.
…I’d Leveled Up a lot last night.
It felt silly to be having this revelation now. Yet so much else had been clouding my mind (mostly regret and the thought of “ow”).
But it was true! Put away all that regret and nausea over the deaths of what felt today like thousands of innocents and what did I get? Levels! Yeah, sword training with a sword I had begun to actively dislike, but also, Levels! Raw strength in numerical form. And gaining power was the whole idea. This outing had been a success.
Stats
Taipha Calico Ranger Lv. 29 EXP: 18% (801/4350)
HP 100% (828/828) SP 46% (367/795)
ATK 153
INT 89
DEF 108
WIS 101
SPD 127
The jump was so big it was bizarre. Five Levels. Hadn’t I gained at least 10 Stat points across everything? Even in my dinkier Stats, like Intelligence?
It felt like so much for almost no effort. Well, no effort on my mind’s part, but a lot of it on my body’s.
Oh yeah, and there was a new Skill in the mix too:
Amber Beam
Fires a small, focused laser.
Cost: 58
What was with my Intelligence-based combat Skills being uncannily similar to stuff I saw right before I got them? Was I…absorbing the stuff around me, for the System to shuffle up? If I theoretically fought an apocalypse being, what the heck then?
Worse…did that mean that if I’d chosen to become a Black Witch, my INT Skills would’ve been stuff like Fire Barrier and whatever but my ATK Skills would’ve been abstract cool stuff like Laser Claw?
Well, I could always discuss it with the people at the house…assuming they even knew about it. Only Chora seemed to have that kind of Skill knowledge because it didn’t come naturally to humans. Uh, put “naturally” in huge scare quotes.
Anyway, Amber Beam was now my lowest-cost attack. Compared even to Air Cutter’s 87, the SP price made it a steal. Plus, it had “laser” in the description. It was probably an awesome attack.
Except that the low cost…probably meant it wasn’t all that powerful. Or that it’d only be active for about half a second.
Turning away from the water, I laid eyes on a nice patch of grass. Then I activated Amber Beam and…had no idea what it was doing.
An amber iris was floating over my shoulder. I flinched away—the eye followed.
Once I realized that this was the Skill, it was sucked away into itself, and then it was gone.
SP 39% (309/795)
Well, that was 58 SP lost.
I tried to take my mind off the failure—and I guess off of everything else—and end my stay at the brook by trying on that hairpin I’d found.
It tumbled out of the bag with a shimmer. Though its description had strongly mentioned gold, that gold was really more of a filigree, shining along and within the crystal made to resemble snow. The holly-branch hairpin shone with emerald in its delicate leaves, and berries that looked painted at first really had a maraschino-cherry fire brewing within them.
I tried it on. I was a cat, so it felt heavy and clunky and didn’t have much hair to clamp onto anyway, so it weighed me down, and it sagged.
Then I Morphed, and my kneeling form looked in the waters. One hand changed the position, patted it softly into place.
It was…
A little much. Setting aside the fact that I’d need to Morph just to make it comfortable…a thing around my neck and a thing on my head? Yeah, I definitely wanted to give this away to a housemate. The colors screamed Reed to me, but then again, the fake snow reminded me of Bayce. Wait…why would snow make me think of Bayce? Was it something about that poem that one time? Her blue hair that swirled like a frosty frozen treat??
In any case, I put the hairpin away, un-Morphed, and sped off. I’d recovered enough.
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map106-4.png]
The Rabbitfoot Plains were here one minute, gone the next. A field I’d once been cautious of speeding through—with all its burrows and muted hisses—was now easy to bound across. If I did hit a burrow, I had no fear of the snapping teeth I might disturb. You can set off a bear trap without falling in.
Then I saw the fringe of trees, rushing forward, uninhibited.
But something pushed through the trees: a rectangle of familiar blue…
And after a pause, she came running.
At first, this sent me into a playful gallop. I’d never raced with Bayce before. In fact, I wasn’t sure she could jog until this moment. Even now, she ran as if her elbows were bolted to her sides, a valley-girl shopper on the track.
But the closer I came, the more I saw her face. There was nothing playful about it.
I wasn’t escaping to fun and comfort that easily.
She fell to a kneel, and I thundered to a stop. Her arms twitched apart, as if considering whether to give me a reassuring hug, but I knew that hug would be more for her than for me.
Bayce was panting hard. “Kidnapped,” she said.